OVS-DPDK with TSO feature running under docker

Abstract

The goal of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is to use standard IT virtualization technology to decouple network functions from private and dedicated network devices, and to use standard X86 architecture to carry on these network functions. In the NFV scenario, virtual switches are used to provide data exchanging services and transferring functions for Virtual Network Feature (VNF) or Virtual Machine (VM). Open vSwitch (OVS) is a high quality and widely used open source virtual switch among the existing virtual switches solutions, but the performance of OVS can't meet the current Gigabit network forwarding demands. To overcome this limitation, the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) has been integrated in OVS to exploit the capabilities of bypassing the kernel space to achieve high performance. But the current OVS-DPDK temporarily does not support the TCP-Segment-Offload (TSO) feature, so the large packet fragmentation needs to be completed by the CPU of the VM. In addition, it is not convenient for the OVS-DPDK to be deployed in different environments and the secondary development is also more cumbersome. In this paper, we combine OVS-DPDK with a lightweight virtualization technology Docker. And further, we enable the TSO feature. The experimental data has shown that the OVS-DPDK under Docker with TSO feature can bring a great performance improvement.